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About

Built by a maker, for makers.

foliascore is a one-person project. It exists because I ran an Etsy shop for a year and still didn't know whether I was making money on it. This is the tool I wished I'd had.

Why I built this.

I ran an Etsy shop for a year before I realised I had no idea what I was actually making on it.

I knew the gross numbers — Etsy puts those right in front of you. What I didn't know was what was left after Etsy's transaction fee, the payment processing fee, the Offsite Ads cut, the listing renewals, the four different VAT lines, and the occasional refund. Sometimes a "best-selling" listing turned out to be the one losing me money once you ran the maths. I just didn't run the maths.

I tried the spreadsheets first — the kind sellers buy on Etsy itself for $25–$30. They're well-built, but you still have to download the CSV every month and copy rows over. Then I tried Craftybase. It does the COGS side properly, but the setup took hours I didn't have, and at my volume the monthly price didn't feel worth it. QuickBooks I bounced off entirely: it's built for service freelancers, not someone selling soap.

What I actually wanted was simple. Connect Etsy. See everything in one place. Know whether my shop was making money before the end of the year. That's what foliascore is.

What it is.

foliascore connects to your Etsy shop (read-only) and shows you your real profit. Orders, fees, ads, refunds, and VAT fill themselves in. You add what your products cost to make, and the dashboard tells you what you're actually keeping per order.

It also tracks inventory — raw materials and finished products — so the same place that answers "am I making money?" keeps your stock in one ledger too.

It's free right now. When pricing launches, it will stay free for hobby shops. The people who join early get six months of the paid tier free.

What I'm trying to avoid.

A few things I've watched other tools do that I don't want this one to do.

  • Don't gate the basics behind a paywall.

    Your profit number is the thing you're here to see. If a tool hides that until you pay, it's not serving you. The free tier shows you everything that matters.

  • Don't require accounting literacy.

    You shouldn't need to understand weighted-average costing or accrual accounting before you can find out whether you had a profitable month. The product is built so that a maker who's never opened a P&L can use it.

  • Don't charge for things you didn't earn.

    Pricing should follow value delivered, not the other way round. I'd rather you stay on the free tier forever and recommend foliascore to one friend than feel pressured to upgrade.

Who's building this.

I'm building foliascore solo, in my spare time, alongside another small shop I run. The team is one person. The support email goes to me. The feedback button in the app goes to me. If something's broken, I'm the one fixing it.

That's slower than what a venture-funded team can ship, but it has one advantage: every decision in the product comes from someone who has been the customer. I know what it's like to dread tax season, to suspect Etsy Ads might be eating your margins, to wonder whether your bestseller is actually losing money. The product is built for the version of me from two years ago.

Why "foliascore"?

A small etymology, for the curious.

Folia is Latin for leaf — also sheet, as in a sheet of paper. The word was used by Renaissance bookkeepers for the leaves of a ledger book, each one tracking a different account.

Score has two relevant meanings. Old English scoru, meaning twenty — the unit a tally was kept in. And the modern English meaning: to know the score is to understand the situation.

A foliascore is both: a ledger that keeps track, and a way to know where you stand.

It's also, more practically, a name I could buy a domain for.

Contact.

hello@foliascore.com — reads daily, replied to within a couple of days.

For anything urgent, the feedback button inside the app is the fastest path. It pings me directly.

The term "Etsy" is a trademark of Etsy, Inc. This application uses the Etsy API but is not endorsed or certified by Etsy, Inc.

Want to see your real Etsy profit?

Free, with all features. Connect Etsy, see the number.